Clever

I found Cloud Atlas to be less a novel than a series of short stories. And on top of that, I found the quality of the stories varied wildly. Furthermore, the differences in style and tone of the various stories jarred me.

Some modest spoilers ahead (the worst is hidden), so stop here if you don’t want to know anything about Cloud Atlas whatsoever.

I just couldn’t shake the feeling that Mitchell had written a series of short stories then later decided to weave them together. This could certainly be factually inaccurate, but as a reader impression, it really doesn’t matter his intention. While reading it, I couldn’t shake the feeling that they were short stories with gimmicky tricks used to tie them together.

Mitchell uses several techniques to relate the stories. The first is to have them set sequentially in history. Each of the stories is set in a different period travelling all the way into the far future (two of the stories would qualify as science fiction). Initially the stories jump forward in time—and then they cycle backwards. He breaks up the stories in Cloud Atlas like layers of an onion so that they read as follows:

Story 1a, Story 2a, Story 3a, Story 4a, Story 5a, Story 6a, Story 7, Story 6b, Story 5b, Story 4b, Story 3b, Story 2b, Story 1b. This has the effect of going forward in time to Story 7 and then back again to complete each story arc.

Mitchell is perhaps attempting to create a vast narrative of history circling back on itself. If he was, he fails partly because several of the stories are so … parochial; they fail to capture anything significant about humanity’s trajectory. As an example, I would single out the story of the British publisher who finds himself trapped in an old folk’s home. Or the story of the young composer. Yes, they give a relative snapshot of some portion of society, but they are so focused on a niche experience that they do not communicate very much about society overall. In contrast, several of the other stories, such as the Luisa Rey story and the two set in the future (and even the one set during the time of colonialism/abolition) do capture a broad sweeping look at the history of the world. This disjunction in subject matter was one of the elements, along with the shifts in style, that was jarring.

A second technique Mitchell uses to connect the stories is to have each story interact with the previous by proposing they occur in different sorts of media. For example, a book found by a character in story 2 tells story number 1. A movie watched by a character in story 3 is actually what happens in story 2, etc. I found this to be a rather thin gimmick. Particularly because several of the overlapping connections were truly farfetched. For example, one of the stories is about an old man escaping from an old folk’s home where he was imprisoned. It was a rather humorous short story overall with minimal profound insight. The story that followed it was set in the far future, when a clone evolved beyond its obedience guidelines to become the figurehead of a revolution against the enslavement of clones. The clone is caught and sentenced to death and as her last request before execution she asks to finish watching the movie she had started viewing … about the old man who escaped from the old folks home. This bothered me for two reasons. One, I didn’t believe that anyone would really make a movie about the old man escaping from the old folks home. I just didn’t buy that. Second, the story of the old man was rather shallow and lacked any profound characteristics that might appeal to the values of a revolutionary hero about to be executed. She could’ve asked to see a movie about Mahatma Ghandi or Buddha or Martin Luther King but no, instead she wants to watch this goofy movie about a publisher/scam artist who got himself trapped in an old folk’s home. This highlighted the artificiality of the technique for me and made it feel contrived.

Lastly, Mitchell gave each of the main characters an ambiguous birthmark that looked like … a comet, I believe. As if to imply … they were reincarnations of each other in some fashion. Or perhaps the spirit of rebellion reborn. Thematically each of the main characters seems … to some degree ... connected to fighting the “system,” if in unequal measures or fashions. This device felt easily tacked on to connect the stories.

As I mentioned earlier, the stories varied in quality. Just one example: The “Luisa Rey Mystery” was the biggest failure for me. It reads like a supermarket mass-paperback suspense thriller. And Mitchell apparently knew it wasn’t up to the level of the other stories because (this is complicated, brace yourself) … the character who was the old man, the publisher, has a manuscript copy of the Luisa Rey Mystery from “the author” who is pitching it to him. He makes some offhand critical comments about it, but notes that, “Hilary V. Hush might … have written a publishable thriller after all … selling at Tesco checkouts; then a Second Mystery, then the Third … overall I concluded the young-hack-versus-corporate-corruption thriller had potential.” So, in essence, the reader is supposed to buy this story because it’s intentionally written poorly? Like a pulp thriller? There is a similar comment about another story in the sequence, “Some of the accents didn’t seem right, but …” Okay, so Mitchell knew his writing wasn’t perfect so he excused it in a subsequent story by having characters comment on how it wasn’t perfect? Seemed like lazy writing to me. Maybe he wrote the Luisa Rey mystery when he was young and figured out how to plug it in here.

Now here I am, about to sound like a hypocrite: I found the politics in Cloud Atlas, uggh, so obvious and so blatant that at times it felt more like Mitchell was lecturing than storytelling. Yes, I agreed with his politics, I agreed with them, but damnit … not good enough! Okay, really, I should be the last person to complain about this because I am so deeply political and all my writings are too. My first novel, Death by Zamboni was truly didactic in its politics. Obvious and in your face. However, it was intended to be so because one of the things I set out to do when I wrote Death by Zamboni was to break every single rule of fiction writing that exists. All those “rules” and “guidelines” you learn in seminars, classes, or magazines about writing. It was rather a big fuck you to expectations and the status quo. I had fun breaking the rules. But a book like this … it’s supposed to be both believable and to have a narrative that communicates with the reader emotionally. As most mainstream literature attempts to do. Admittedly, it is very difficult to create awareness about political matters without seeming contrived. But that is what separates a great work from a so-so one. It manages to be political in the way it embodies humanity without feeling as if it’s lecturing you. In that regard, Mitchell utterly fails.

On the plus side, I did enjoy much of the writing. As standalone stories, the ones without the most blatant politics were quite enjoyable. Will I read another Mitchell? Absolutely. I’d like to see what he does with a single novel thread rather than something so segmented. He obviously has great talent as a writer, but this particular book was a mixed bag for me.

Cloud Atlas is layered, complex, uniquely structured, occasionally puzzling, often moving, and definitely not for the faint of heart. It's famously (or infamously) structured with a sextet of interconnected stories that range from the mid-1800s to the distant future.

Spent the fortnight gone in the music room, reworking my year's fragments into a 'sextet for overlapping soloists': piano, clarinet, 'cello, flute, oboe and violin, each in its own language of key, scale, and color. In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor: in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan't know until it's finished.

I like that Mitchell has a sense of humor about his story. :) Like this Cloud Atlas Sextet musical piece written by one of the characters, each story is told by a different voice, and cuts off abruptly (sometimes in mid-sentence) until the central story. Then the storyline moves back again through time, wrapping up each tale. To use another simile, the novel is very much like a set of Russian nesting dolls that is taken apart and then put back together again.

One model of time: an infinite matryoshka doll of painted moments, each "shell" (the present) encased inside a nest of "shells" (previous presents) I call the actual past but which we perceive as the virtual past. The doll of "now" likewise encases a nest of presents yet to be, which I call the actual future but which we perceive as the virtual future.

Despite the sometimes huge leaps in time, each story is tied to the stories before and after it by colorful threads: characters read (or view) each others' stories; themes resurface, showing a different face; memorable scenes--like increasingly small fruit being shot off a reluctant clone's head with an arrow--are unexpectedly reflected in a similar scene in a later story; characters experience deja vu moments that tie them to another character in a different story. karen's description in her review is so apt: "the stories. they sneak into each others' worlds both thematically, and more overtly, like foraging little mice on mouse-missions. sometimes they are each others' stories."

Part 1 is the 1850-era journal of Adam Ewing, an American notary who is traveling in the South Pacific. He witnesses the brutality of the Maori people toward the Moriori natives, not realizing — at first — that his own white people are often equally as brutal and predatory. This story is told in the style of Herman Melville, which, frankly, makes for a tough start to the novel. But don't lose heart, because very soon comes:

Part 2: Letters written in 1931 by a young Robert Frobisher, an amoral, self-centered, dishonest, but very funny and charming bisexual musical genius, to his friend Rufus Sixsmith. Frobisher, disinherited and looking to escape from his debts, attaches himself as an assistant to an older, nearly blind musician, Vyvyan Ayrs, who is living in Belgium. After a rocky start, the musical collaboration goes well, but soon problems start to surface again. Adam Ewing's journal is discovered by Robert while he is fishing around in the Ayrs' home, looking for old books to steal and sell.

Part 3: It's 1975, and Rufus Sixsmith is now an older man who meets a journalist, Luisa Rey, in California when they're stuck together in a broken elevator. Luisa is looking for a good story, and Rufus has some dirt on the new nuclear reactor in the area. This piece reads like a fast-moving crime novel that you'd pick up in an airport to distract you on your flight.

Part 4: In the early 2000s, Timothy Cavendish, a 60-something British man who is a vanity publisher, is writing his memoirs. One of his authors (who comes from a rough family) tosses his worst literary critic over the side of a skyscraper, killing him. The resulting publicity makes the author's book an instant bestseller. Though the author is in jail, his brothers come to Timothy looking for a piece of the monetary pie. Timothy goes on the run . . .

Part 5: Sometime in the not-too-far-distant future, in what used to be Korea, not-too-bright clones ("fabricants") are used as a source of slave labor. They are deemed to have no soul. Corporate power rules, and the slang amusingly reflects that as several trademarks are now the generic names for everyday objects (people wear nikes on their feet, drive fords and watch disneys). Sonmi-451 is a fabricant fast food worker who is unexpectedly "ascending," gaining greatly increased intelligence and understanding. A group steals her away from the restaurant, but what is their agenda for Sonmi-451?

Part 6: In a far-distant future, Zachry tells the story of his adventures in his youth on the "Big I" of "Hawi" to a group of children. Zachry's people, the Valleymen, are a no-tech, superstitious, rural people who worship the goddess Sonmi and are periodically in danger from Kona raiders, who seek to enslave them. The Valleyman are also visited annually by the Prescients, who seem to be the one group of people who still have technology and scientific understanding. One of the Prescients, Meronym, asks to stay with Zachry's people for a year and Zachry's family is elected to host her, much to his dismay. They eventually become friends as he leads her on a pilgrimage to what's left of the observatories on Mauna Kea, symbolically capping the novel as events start to descend from there.

Mitchell's ability to create very distinct narrators, writing styles, and futuristic languages without sacrificing (too much) understanding is truly praiseworthy. It helped me to know that each story section was (with the exception of the culminating central story) only about 40 pages long, so if I was having difficulties with one narrator I had the comfort of knowing that a different narrator would soon take over. Also, I cheerfully sacrificed the element of surprise for the satisfaction of better understanding, and read several online discussions and reviews of Cloud Atlas while I was reading each section of the book. The Cloud Atlas Readalong at editorialeyes.net was particularly helpful. http://editorialeyes.net/the-cloud-at...

Cloud Atlas grapples with some heavy themes: power, greed, slavery, predatory vs. selfless behavior, prejudice, love, the nature of souls . . . I could go on. I think I may admire this book more than I love it, but it's an amazing achievement and really made me think. It is absolutely worth reading if you're up for a mental challenge.

Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an’ tho’ a cloud’s shape nor hue nor size don’t stay the same, it’s still a cloud an’ so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud’s blowed from or who the soul’ll be ‘morrow? Only Sonmi the east an’ the west an’ the compass an’ the atlas, yay, only the atlas o’ clouds.

(Book 13 From 1001 Books) - Cloud Atlas, David (Stephen) Mitchell

The book consists of six nested stories; each is read or observed by a main character of the next, thus they progress in time through the central sixth story.

The first five stories are each interrupted at a pivotal moment. After the sixth story, the others are closed in reverse chronological order, with the main character reading or observing the chronologically earlier work in the chain. Each story contains a document, movie, or tradition that appears in an earlier story.

تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز بیست و چهارم ماه آگوست سال 2014میلادی

عنوان: اطلس ابر؛ اثر: دیوید میچل؛ مترجم: علی منصوری، مشخصات نشر تهران، روزگار، 1392، در 680ص، شابک 9789643744816؛ موضوع: داستانهای نویسندگان بریتانیا - سده ی 21م

داستان ویژگیها، و شباهت انسانها را، در شش عصر ناهمگون به تصویر خیال میکشد؛ عبارت «اطلس»، در میتولوژی «یونان»، نام یکی از گروه «تایتان»هاست، که نافرمانی آغاز کردند، آنگاه خدایان، «اطلس» را کیفر دادند، تا کره ی زمین را بر سر و با شانه های خویش حمل کند؛ «پرسیوس» را بر وی رحمت آمد، و او را به کوههایی انتقال داد، کوههای مزبور، همان جبال «اطلس» هستند، که بدان سبب به نام وی خوانده شده اند؛ در سده ی شانزده میلادی، که در «اروپا» کتابهای «جغرافیا»، با نقشه انتشار یافت، صورت «اطلس» را، بر پشت جلد کتابها، ترسیم کردند، در حالیکه ایشان کره ی زمین را حمل میکند، و از آن پس، کتابهای نقشه جغرافیا را «اطلس» خواندند؛ فیلمی نیز با اقتباس از همین کتاب ساخته شده است، فیلمنامه از شش داستان جداگانه، و برای شش دوره ی زمانی متفاوت، نوشته شده است؛ «یک - سال 1849میلادی...؛ سفری بر امواج دریا؛ از جزایر اقیانوس آرام تا سان فرانسیسکو»؛ «دو - سال 1936میلادی، کمبریج، شاهکار بدنام»؛ «سه - سال 1973میلادی سانفرانسیسکو؛ حقیقت پر هزینه»؛ «چهار - سال 2012میلادی، لندن؛ قتلی تأثیر گذار»؛ «پنج – سال 2144میلادی، سئول؛ انقلابی متفاوت»؛ «شش – یکصد و شصت سال پس از پایان دنیا؛ اینک اخر الزمان».؛

نقل از متن: (روزنوشتهای «آدام اِوینگ» از اقیانوس آرام جنوبی، پنجشنبه، هفت نوامبرــ آنسوی دهکده­ ی سرخپوستان، در ساحلی متروک، به رد پاهای جدیدی برخوردم؛ از میان جلبکها و نارگیلهای دریاییِ گندیده و بامبوها، ردپاها مرا به صاحب خود رساندند؛ مردی سفید پوست، با پاچه ها و آستینهای تا خورده، ریشی مرتب، و یک کلاه خز فوق ­العاده بزرگ؛ با چنان دقت و جدیتی با یک قاشق چای­خوری مشغول کندن، و الک کردن ماسه­ ی خاکستری بود که تا وقتی از فاصله­ ی ده یاردی، به او سلام کردم، متوجه حضورم نشد؛ اینگونه بود که با جناب «دکتر هنری گوس»، جراحی از نجبای لندن آشنا شدم؛ ملیت او برایم تعجب ­آور نبود؛ چرا که هیچ آشیانه­ ی متروک یا جزیره­ ی دور افتاده ­ای نیست که پای یک انگلیسی به آن نرسیده باشد، حتی نقاطی که روی هیچ نقشه­ ای قابل مشاهده نباشند

آیا جناب دکتر در این ساحل نکبت­بار چیزی گم کرده بودند؟ آیا من می­توانستم کمکی به ایشان بکنم؟ «دکتر گوس» سرش را تکان داد و گره دستمالش را باز کرد و با غروری آشکار محتویات آن را نشان داد؛ «دندان، جناب، این جامهای مینایی، هدف جستجوی بنده هستند؛ در سالیان گذشته این کرانه ­ی روستایی محل سورچرانی آدمخواران بوده، بله، جایی که قوی­ترها، ضعیف­ترها را می­بلعیدند، و دندانها را به بیرون تف می­کرده­ اند، همانطور که جنابعالی یا بنده هسته­ ی گیلاس را تف می­کنیم؛ اما این دندانهای آسیاب، حضرت آقا، تبدیل به طلا خواهد شد؛ چطور؟ یک صنعتگر خیابان پیکادلی که برای نجیبزادگان دندان عاریه ­ای می­سا،زد مبلغ سخاوتمندا نه­ای برای دندن های انسان می­پردا؛د. می­دانید با یک چهارم پوند از این دندن ها چقدر عایدم می­شود، قربان؟»؛

اعتراف کردم که نمی­دانم

من هم به شما نمی­گویم قربان، چون که این از اسرار حرفه ا­ست!» دماغش را مالید؛ «جناب اِوینگ، شما با زوجه ­ی مارکیز گریس اهلِ مِی­فیر آشنا هستید؟ خیر؟ خوش به سعادتان، چرا که او لاشه ­ای­ست در لباس زنانه؛ پنج سال از لکه دار شدن نام من توسط این عجوزه ­ی نابکار می­گذرد، بله، چیزی که منجر به تحریم شدن من توسط اشراف شد،» دکتر «گوس» نگاهش را به دریا دوخت

آوارگی من از همان ساعت شوم آغاز شد

به دکتر گوس ابراز همدردی کردم

ممنونم قربان، ممنون، اما این دندانها -دستمالش را تکان داد- «فرشته ها­ی رستگاری من ­اند؛ اجازه دهید توضیح دهم؛ زوجه­ ی مارکیز از دندانهایی عاریه ­ای استفاده می­کند، که پزشک مذکور آنها را می­سازد؛ کریسمس بعد، زمانی که آن زن احمق ضیافت مجللش را با حضور سران حکومتی و اشراف ترتیب دهد، من، هنری گوس، از جایم برخواهم خواست و به همگان اعلام خواهم کرد که میزبان­مان با دندانهای آدمخواران مشغول جویدن غذایش است! قابل پیش ­بینی­ است که سِر هوبارت با من به مخالفت می­پردازد؛ آن دهاتی فریاد خواهد کشید «شواهدت را ارائه کن، یا صدایت را ببر.» من خواهم گفت: «شواهد، سر هوبارت؟ آه، من خودم دندانهای مادرتان را از یک سلف­دانی در اقیانوس آرام جنوبی جمع کردم؛ اینجا، قربان، این هم تعدادی از رفقای­ آنها! و دندانها را توی ظرف سوپ­خوری آن زن خالی می­کنم، و اینکار حضرت آقا آتش انتقامم را فرو می­نشاند! بذله­ گویان مارکیزِ بیروح را در روزنامه های­شان به سخره خواهند کشید و تا یک فصل بعد او خیلی خوش اقبال خواهد بود حتی اگر به ضیافت فقرا دعوت شود!»؛

با عجله با هنری گوس وداع کردم. خیال می­کنم او مجنون باشد

جمعه، هشت نوامبر- در کارگاه کشتی ­سازی ساده­ ی زیر پنجره­­ ی اتاقم، کار ساخت تیر دکل کشتی تحت نظارت جناب واکر در جریان است؛ یگانه میخانه ­دارِ اُوشن بِی که همچنین تاجرِ عمده­ ی الوار نیز هست و در مورد سالها تجربه­ اش به عنوان یک استاد کشتی ­ساز در لیورپول لاف می­زند؛ (آنقدر از آداب و رسوم این نواحی سرم می­شود که بتوانم چنین دروغ بعیدی را تشخیص دهم.) جناب اِسکاید به من گفتند که یک هفته­ ی تمام تا اتمام کار و تحویل «پرافِتِس» باقی مانده؛ هفت روز دیگر سر کردن در «ماسکت»، حکم شومی به نظر می­رسد، با این حال وقتی به یاد نیش هولناک طوفان و ملوانانی افتادم که در کشتی از دست دادیم، بداقبالی کنونی­ در نظرم جلوه­ اش را از دست داد

امروز در پلکان به دکتر گوس برخوردم، و صبحانه را با هم خوردیم؛ او از اواسط اکتبر در ماسکت ساکن است؛ یعنی بعد از این که با یک کشتی تجاری برزیلی به نام «نامورادوس» از فیجی به اینجا آمده؛ در فیجی او به طبابت مشغول بوده و حالا هم منتظر رسیدن یک کشتی شکار سیل استرالیایی با نام «نِلی» ا­ست که مدتها از موعد آمدنش می­گذرد، و می­خواهد با آن به سیدنی برود؛ از مستعمره هم با یک کشتی مسافربری خود را به زادگاهش لندن میرساند

قضاوت من درباره­ ی دکتر گوس عجولانه و غیرمنصفانه بود؛ در حرفه­ ی من آدم باید همچون دیوژن، بدبین و کلبی مسلک باشد، اما کلبی مسلک بودن هم می­تواند چشم آدم را به روی خصوصیات ظریف­تر ببندد؛ دکتر غرابتهای خاص خود را دارد و تنها با یک جرعه پیسکوی پرتغالی (زیاده­ روی نمی­کند)، تک تک آنها را برمی­شمرد، اما ضمانت می­دهم که او باید یگانه نجیب­زاده­ ی دیگر در عرض جغرافیایی شرق سیدنی و غرب والپریسو باشد؛ شاید حتی برای­اش معرفی­نامه­ ای به خانواده­ ی پاتریج­ در سیدنی بنویسم، چرا که دکتر گوس و فرد عزیز هر دو از یک قماش ­اند

هوای نامساعد مانع از گردش صبح­گاهی ­ام شد، کنار آتش به افسانه­ سرایی نشستیم و ساعتها برای­مان همچون دقایقی گذشت؛ برای او مفصلا از تیلدا و جکسون گفتم و از وحشتم درباره­­ ی «تب طلا» در سانفرانسیسکو صحبت کردم؛ سپس گفتگوی­مان به شهر محل سکونت من کشید و بعد هم در مورد گیبون و گودوین و انگلها و لوکوموتو ها صحبت کرد؛م. یک محاوره­ ی گرم چیزی­ست که به شدت در عرشه­ ی پرافِتِس از آن محروم بودم، و دکتر هم به تحقیق آدم همه چیز دان و فهمیده ­ای­ست؛ به علاوه او ارتشی از مهره های حکاکی شده شطرنج­ دارد، که تا عزیمت پرافِتِس یا ورود نِلی ما را سرگرم نگاه خواهند داشت)؛ پایان نقل

تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 11/08/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 10/06/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی

Cloud Atlas is a clown car. Clown after clown keeps popping out of this one car, and each one has a different trick; some tricks are shiny, but in the end it's still tricks.

There are six stories juggled together here. Are the short stories interrelated? No, not really. There are matching birthmarks, which Mitchell calls "a symbol really of the universality of human nature," which isn't a relationship unless you consider all stories about humans interrelated. He goes on to say, "The book's theme is predacity, the way individuals prey on individuals, groups on groups, nations on nations, tribes on tribes. So I just take this theme and in a sense reincarnate that theme in another context." So...y'know, predacity is just conflict, which is just storytelling. "Something happens." That's our theme.

Here's what happens:
1. In The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing, in 1850 some dude is on a boat to California. Dr. Goose invents a ghastly disease and poisons him in order to steal his stuff. He's saved by this one slave and learns that slavery is bad.

If we believe that humanity may transcend tooth & claw, if we believe divers races & creeds can share this world as peaceably as the orphans share their candlenut tree, if we believe leaders must be just, violence muzzled, power accountable & the riches of the Earth & its Oceans shared equitably, such a world will come to pass.

I pulled this whole quote out because it sounds like a high school diversity workshop: it is treacly bullshit and as a mission statement it's sophomoric.

2. Letters from Zedelghem: in the best story, the composer Frobisher in 1931 leeches himself onto the more famous publisher Ayrs, who in turn leeches onto his talent. Frobisher fucks his wife, falls in love with his daughter, writes his one brilliant piece and kills himself.

3. Our most conventional story, Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery, finds this lady trying to expose an unsafe power plant in 1975. Everyone tries to kill her but she succeeds. "It's like panning for gold in a muddy torrent. Truth is the gold." Uh huh.

4. In The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish, set around now and with a nod to Martin Amis, the titular asshole is imprisoned in a nursing home but manages to escape. That reminds me, I read this during ten days in suburbia watching "ads" on "TV" and we kept seeing one for A Place For Mom that we were very entertained by.

5. We move into the future with An Orison of Soon-Mi, and this really impresses a lot of people, that we're swooping from 1850 forward into the fuuuuuuture, and if that sounds impressive to you then maybe you'll like this book better than I did; I don't care. It's just another trick. Anyway, this clone lady realizes that she's a slave. It turns out that her whole rebellion was plotted by the government in order to foment prejudice against clones, which seems clever until you think about it for like a minute. Then she gets executed.

6. In the middle, shittiest and longest uninterrupted story, Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After, we're in a boring post-apocalyptic Hawaii where everyone has started speaking in difficult and annoying slang. A lady who lives on, I'm gonna guess an aircraft carrier, makes friends with this one kid. There are magic prophesies - seriously, magic. One-dimensional bad guys attack. Some kid gets raped, in case we weren't sure they were bad guys.

Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an' tho' a cloud's shape nor hue nor size don't stay the same, it's still a cloud an' so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud's blowed from or who the soul'll be 'morrow? Only Sonmi the east an' the west an' the compass an' the atlas, yay, only the atlas o' clouds.

There's some more claptrap for you, and there's not much to this collection of short stories. Platitudes and gimmicks. High school reading. It's a clown car. My, that's a lot of clowns! And each one silly.

1st read (2009): A lovely book of nesting stories, lightly connected to each other in various ways. My favorite was Letters from Zedelghem, because I love how Mitchell writes about music. I haven't found out how he can be so cheeky and reverent about people and life at the same time, but he manages, and it makes me feel so connected to his characters and stories.

2nd read (2012): As usual, I had forgotten quite a bit of this book. This time around, I instigated this as a "renegade read" for the Sword and Laser bookclub, picked it for my LED book club, and joined half the country in reading it before the movie comes out. I don't think I really got the story before, didn't get the 'punchline' of sorts to "An Orison of Somni-451."

I downloaded the audio for this too, even while I re-read most of it in print. Every different section has a different narrator, and the "Sloosha's Crossin'" chapter was far easier to listen to than to read because of the post-apocalyptic Hawaiian dialect.

This book is a masterpiece. I can't believe it didn't win the Booker Prize when it was on the shortlist. Full disclosure - I haven't read the Hollinghurst, but it would have to be really good to impress me.

I'm looking forward to the discussions I'll be having about this book, and here's to hoping that the movie doesn't get it wrong (not banking on it).

Some of the little bits:

"A half-read book is a half-finished love affair."

"I might as well join the avant-garde and throw darts at pieces of paper with notes written on 'em."

"That love loves fidelity, she riposted, is a myth woven by men from their insecurities."

"How vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false. Composers are merely scribblers of cave paintings. One writes music because one is eternal and because, if one didn't, the wolves and blizzards would be at one's throat all the sooner."

"We'll dip our toes in a predatory, amoral, godless universe - but only our toes."

"Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms around the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage."

"Oh, aging is ruddy unbearable! The I's we were yearn to breathe the world's air again, but can they ever break out from these calcified cocoons? Oh, can they hell."

"..As if there could be anything not done a hundred thousand times between Aristophanes and Andrew Void-Webber!...As if Art is the What, not the How!"

"And only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean! Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?"

David Mitchell has written a profoundly impressive mosaic novel, the 7 distinct stories of which display an almost unimaginably diverse range of tone, style, approach, and narrative voice. Ultimately, though, it is a tough novel for me to fall all the way in love with. While its breadth and scope are born out of a compelling and urgent exploration of important themes — the dangers of colonialism, authoritarianism, corporatism, eugenics, class structures, and war (to name a few) — I can’t help but shake the feeling as I was reading this of being privy to a very talented craftsman conducting an elaborate, flashy, showy, enjoyable exercise. The moments when I really felt for and with the characters’ inner lives were too few and far between for me to ever be completely swept away by their exploits.

I’m glad to have read it, and I remain deeply impressed by how skilled Mitchell is at having pulled off such an unlikely feat. I’d love to see him drop more deeply into his character’s hearts in his other work, though.

Hey readers...



Look at the book you're reading...



...now back to me.



Now back at the book you're reading...



...now back at me.



Sadly, that book was (probably) not written by me. But if you'd check out my book, Cloud Atlas, you'd know that I could have written it if I just wanted to. Look back at the book...



...and now back up. Who's that?



That's me, the author of Cloud Atlas, which is the book you could have been reading. What's in your hand?



It's Cloud Atlas, which is a historical novel about a pacific voyage all the way back in the 1800's. Back at me.



Now back at Cloud Atlas. Look, it's now a thriller.



And look again. Cloud Atlas is now science fiction.



Anything is possible when a book contains several stories inside...



...and I am the author.



Cloud Atlas is arguably David Mitchell's (all right, I'll stop pretending - that's him in the pictures) most famous novel - and if it isn't, it certailnly will be after the Wachowskis will turn it into a big budged movie - the trailer is not that bad looking. The novel itself is critically acclaimed - it won the British Book Awards Literary Fiction Award, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and even nominated for two of the prestigious awards given to works of science fiction - the Nebula and Arthur C. Clarke award.

So what should we, the readers, make of Cloud Atlas? By now, probably everyone interested in reading it has heard that it's composed of six different storylines, all of which interact with each other in some way. The single most impressive thing about the novel is the fact that the author adapts a unique narrative voice for each of these sections, making Cloud Atlas a feat of literary ventriloquism. The six storylines are also different in structure, setting and timelines.

The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing opens the novel: set around 1850, the journal is a first person account of a south Pacific journey of the naive Adam Ewing, who finds himself ashore on the Chattam Islands near New Zealand. He falls sick, and seeks help from a suspicious doctor who looks at his money with hungry eyes, and also learns a bit of the native history: the enslavement of the Moriori by the Maori.

Letters from Zedelghem is the next sequence, and as the title suggests it's epistolary. The titular letters are written by Robert Frobisher to Rufus Sixmith. Frobisher is a completely broke English musician who buys his daily bread by being a hired hand for a Belgian composer - Ayrs. Despite the implications that Sixmith is his lover, Frobisher starts an affair with Ayr's wife and it does not help that Ayrs also has a young daughter.

Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery is the next section which tells the tale of Louisa Rey, a journalist who follows the lead that some nuclear plants are unsafe and can blow up the world: of course there are people who do not wish for this information to be made public. Dressed up as a thriller, it is definitely the most fast paced section of the novel and does a convincig job at passing as a grocery store rack paperback novel.

The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish is probably my favorite section: 65 year old Timothy Cavendish is a vanity publisher who gets himself into trouble with one of his clients (who happens to be a gangster) and has to lay low for a while; His brother arranges a safe place for him to go to. Only when he arrives he discovers that the hideaway is a nursing home; Cavendish is an extremely likeable old codger and lots of hilarity ensues as he attempts to break free. It gets downhill from here.

An Orison of Sonmi~451 is the least inspired section: a derivative dystopian fare, totally by the book. Overused dystopian tropes abound: Far future, immensely opressive totalitarian society, corporate overlords, genetically engingered slaves (cannibalism!), neologisms and simple spelling changes such as "xcitement, xpendable, xtra". etc. To top the cake it is set in futuristic Korea, complete with "the Beloved Chairman" who is in control of All Things. Not very, um, subtle, you know.

Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After or Trainspotting in Space continues with the science fiction theme, and is set in post-apocalyptic Hawaii. Humanity has been almost completely wiped out during "The Fall". Zachry, the protagonist, is an old man recounting his teenage years, when he met Meronym, a member of a former advanced civilization. The section overuses apostrophes to an almost ridiculous extent, making me regret ever complaining about the simplicity of spelling changes in the Somni section. The style hangs over the content unmercifully, like a sharp sword, ready to drop at any moment to cut your reading enjoyment - and does exactly that, all the time.

After Slosha we return to the preceding stories yet again, this time in the reverse order, going back in time: Beginning with futuristic tale of Somni and ending with the concluding entries of the journal of Adam Ewing, in the 1850's.

So what is the big deal? The structure. On the back cover is Michael Chabon's appraisal of the novel as "series of nested dolls or Chinese boxes, a puzzle-book" and as the Wachowski's boldly emphasize in all caps in the trailer for the upcoming film, "EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED". However, I found these connections to be sketchy at best: For example, Ewing's journal is conveniently found by Frobisher at a bookshelf of his Belgian employer; Rufus Sixmith, the addressee of Frobisher's letters just happens to be a whistleblower collaborating with Louisa Rey; Louisa Rey's story is a manuscript that Cavendish is offered for publication; Cavendish's goofy adventure is a Disney romp watched by Somni in the far future, and Somni herself is a goddess worshipped by Zachry, who knows her story from a futuristic recording device. There are further attempts to stitch these stories together - a recurring birthmark, one character seemingly remembering a piece of music from another time, the recurrence of the number six - six stories, a character named...Sixmith who is...66 years old, etc. If the "nested dolls" analogy passed you by, the author has Isaac Sachs, an engineer (how appropriate!) explain the magic:

"“One model of time: an infinite matryoshka doll of painted moments, each ‘shell’ (the present) encased inside a nest of ‘shells’ (previous presents) I call the actual past but which we perceive as the virtual past. The doll of ‘now’ likewise encases a nest of presents yet to be, which I call the actual future but which we perceive as the virtual future.”"

But that is not all. Frobisher's musical masterpiece to be is called The Cloud Atlas Sextet, which he describes as:

"a 'sextet for overlapping soloists': piano, clarinet, 'cello, flute, oboe, and violin, each in its own language of key, scale, and color. In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor; in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order."

...which is obviously how Cloud Atlas, the novel, is structured. It seems to me as if the author did not trust his readers and had to spell out his game in fear of being misunderstood, or worse: the trick going unnoticed. He also seems to see critics coming, and in the next sentence Frobisher thinks about his work: "Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan't know until it's finished, and by then it'll be too late.”" The concept is laid out for the reader in its entirety at one moment: when the author namecalls the reincarnation, having Timothy Cavendish discount the notion of Louisa Rey being Robert Frobisher reincarnated - he has the same birthmark as them both.. Sometimes it's done in an almost humorous way: Timothy Cavendish mutters that "Soylent Green is people", and that some geeks must be "Cloning humans for shady Koreans" - which is exactly what happens in the Somni section.

Revolutionary or Gimmicky? For this jury Cloud Atlas does not have what it takes to be revolutionary, meaning something...well, revolutionary. The structure of the novel appears to be complex at the first glance, but during actual reading shows itself as not overly complex, and the author makes sure that the reader will understand it. The stories themselves are not strong enough to stand on their own: the Louisa Rey mystery is intentionally bland, but the Orison of Somni 451 is formulaic to the bone, where all characters are reduced to familiar stereotypes: The tyranical Big Brother regime and the opressed sentient beings who should not be capable of complex thought but are, which dates back to Yevgeny Zamyatin's brillian novel We, which has been written in...1921, going through more famous examples - Brave New World, 1984, movies such as the original Planet of the Apes, THX1138, etc etc etc. To give the author credit the dystopian formula has been firmly estabilished (and exploited - currently especially on the young adult market) and it's quite difficult (if not downright impossible) to come up with any innovations: especially if there's a set limit on the lenght of the piece which hardly allows for any worldbuilding, forcing the author to work with the barest minimum.

The recurring theme ofCloud Atlas is enslavement and exploitation of human beings. Ewing is exposed to enslavement of one tribe by another and is forced to decide the fate of a person; penniless Frobisher is forced to leave England for Belgium, where he is drawn into a net cast by an aging composer, who wants to exploit his talent; Louisa Rey is fighting the capitalist ubermench who do not care about the dangers of a nuclear reactor. Tinmothy Cavendish has to escape from dangerous people and literally becomes enslaved in a home for the elderly; Sonmi is a genetically enginereed fabricant who was made to be used. Throughout the ages, the weaker are controlled, abused and exploited by the stronger, who want even more riches and strenght.

is it a new topic? No. Does Cloud Atlas offer a new look at it? alas, the answer also has to be no. The book opposes the notion of survival of the fittest, where "the weak are the meat that the strong eat" - and this is obviously wrong. But in the year 2004 (when it was published) did we not know that already? The dangers of capitalism and the money-oriented western civilization, its contemporary face being the Louisa Rey sections and the gloomy vision of the future shown in the Orison of Somni; the post-colonial white guilt for which the vessel is the character of Adam Ewing. Adam Ewing seems to exist to only espouse this notion; after being rescued by a Noble Savage he is told about the bloodthirst of the White Race by the Doctor (who is the Evil character since this is how he was estabilished to be). The morality play hits home and Ewing decides that the way the world is is Wrong and there is worth in striving for a seemingly impossible Change where everyone is Free. This storyline is not bad by default, but it is hardly original and there is hardly any place for ambiguity; I was surprised at the comparisons with Benito Cereno, which is probably my favorite work by Melville (along with the brilliant Bartleby, the Scrivener - which is also about individualism and freedom, but in a completely different manner). The genius of Melville's work lies in its ambiguity: it has been praised and criticized because of it, as various readers read it either as a racist work in support of slavery, while other readers read it as an anti-slavery text in support of abolition. There is little if any of this in Adam Ewing's journal; of course it's wrong to own another human being as property, and most of the humanity came to agree on this...after we stole land from one another and replaced their people with ours, colonized and governed them against their will and exploited them in slave labor. Melville's work was written in 1856, when abolition was a controversial (and dangerous) issue; even though Adam Ewing's journal is set in that time period, we can't forget that it was created in the 2000's. There is not enough originality or exceptionality to it, and solely by attempting to stress the human freedom it borders dangerously on the banal repetition of something done earlier and better.

The author is at his best in the narratives of Frobisher and Cavendish, where he handles two drastically different characters with skill and verve. Both are Englishmen, though of different times and of different age and profession: Frobisher is young, cynical, cunning, brash and unapologetic; Cavendish is elderly, sheepish, slow and silly. It is in these two narratives where the author's talent really shines; he writes with panache and flamboyance, and his whimsical humor is contrasted with rawness and emotion. Frobisher's egoism and frustration are off-putting, and yet the reader cannot help but feel some sympathy for his character and wish him good in creating the work of his life; Cavendish's geriatric adventure is surprisingly rollicking and full of charm. It is their stories which work the best in this book, and are the most affecting and memorable.

On the whole, Cloud Atlas reads more as an exercise in trying to write stories in different genres and styles, and then weaving them together; ultimately, it does not really work. The majority of the stories are not strong enough to stand on their own, and there is not enough to bind them together; even the two stories I enjoyed suffer from being just a part of the whole which doesn't really work. It lacks the profundity and depth it needs to be an important work; a more vicious critic would say that the author arranged his stories like matryoshkas to hide his inability to offer meaningful and perceptive insights into the human nature. I doubt that Cloud Atlas is such a case, and because of this I can't wish it would have been all that it was said to be, profound and meaningful, offering a fresh approach to the subject which is so important. But what can you say about things on which so many said so much over the centuries? Like clouds, Cloud Atlas eventually disperses, leaving in memory snapshots of its elements, and not the whole.

I think people sometimes toss around the idea that something they've read or seen or heard has "changed" them. I almost never come away from something feeling changed, at least not in any way that I can immediately sense. But after I'd finished Cloud Atlas, I had this bizarre, unshakable feeling of being more connected than I was before I'd read it, not just to the people around me, but to those who'd gone before me, and those who will come after me as well.

In my opinion, this is a work of pure genius. There's certainly a clever gimmick to the novel's structure, but it isn't just cleverness for the sake of cleverness. While it can be fascinating and pleasurable to discover the ways in which Mitchell's novel fits together, the structure is also crucial to the novel's thematic concerns and to its emotional power. Of course, given the diversity of voices in the novel, readers will almost invariably come away enjoying some more than others. I enjoyed all but one of them to greater or lesser degrees--one character I started out detesting was, by the end, my favorite, and there was one story that I never cared for and felt I just had to get through it to get back to the good stuff.

There's so much going on in this book that no little review I might throw together and toss up on a website is going to do it justice, so I'm not even going to try. Primarily, it's about different types of storytelling--oral tradition, pulp fiction, journal writing and so on--and how stories can both empower us and hold power over us. (In one of the stories, missionaries on an island in the Pacific in the 1850s intertwine Christianity with the use of tobacco, addicting the native people and giving the missionaries added control.) But more than just being incredibly stimulating on an intellectual level, the novel is extremely engaging emotionally. Like the virtuosic piece of music that plays such a crucial role in the narrative, like the clouds from which both the piece and the novel take their names, the narrative, and the emotions it creates, are constantly changing shape. And like I said, by the time I was done travelling through this novel, I genuinely felt like I'd been changed, too.

(I went into this book knowing quite little, and I think it made the whole experience a lot more enjoyable, so I'd strongly advise anyone who is considering reading it to avoid looking at summaries or reviews that go into much detail about the plot or structure of the book.)

9/25/17: watched the movie second time. Emotionally stirring and I felt deep connection with each character. Superb. The book reads like like the movie, but in ultra-slow motion, for me. Ha. :-). Also wanted to mention I listen to this instrumental by Paul Cardall when I go through some grieving over a recent divorce. It brings back vivid memories in decaying pathways of my brain. Life and Death. If the Cloud Atlas Sextet came into reality, I imagine it as this (don't think it's a sextet though, but not a music expert): https://youtu.be/lAmyLScoBUM. See what you think of it?

Second read: 8/31/17 (start)

Oh, man. What a beautiful work of literature. I almost read it again but gave it to a friend to read instead. I've owned a copy of this twice. The first time I gave it to someone who never gave it back. I found another copy for a buck a couple years later at the Dollar Tree. The irony of the Karmic message in the book. I love this book. It has a special place in my heart.
-------------------------
Original Review:

FIVE PLUS, ONE OF THE BEST OF THE BEST!!!!

I went to the bookstore last Friday to pick a book I placed on hold, and went to search for another specific book, but the shelves didn’t have it. For fun, I decided to look at the shelves, browse a bit, and my eyes saw a magnetic sight. At the top of this book, it said, “Cloud.” The picture on the front drew me like a marionette tugs a puppet.

Tom Hanks has futuristic tribal tattoos on the side of his face and he looks perplexed in a side view. Below him and to his left Holly Berry in a brown coat and scarf peers to her left in paranoia. Under her a man in a V-neck sweater and tie smiles confidently and looks somewhere we can’t see. Below and to that man’s left stands an older woman with similar tribal tattoos on her face like Mr. Hanks, and in futuristic Druid-like white garb. To the woman’s left a bigger size picture of a man in a top-hat captions a face of resonant thought. Under him an old man smiles on the telephone. To the man’s right a small Korean girl in a small white, sleeveless dress sits on a stone pavement staring in the distance; her face holds distress and depression over a collar of metal around her neck. To the respective lefts of the old woman, the Korean girl and the confident man sits a young man at a piano, playing in deep and content thought.

I had the same feeling I had when I watched this Spielberg television show in 1985 called “Amazing Stories,” and they were just that to my seven year old mind. I remembered the story of this old man who kept talking about a train, a ghost train. They lived on an open field of farmland, and this ghost train comes at the end, and the story builds suspense as you wonder if it will come, and then the sounds of a train echo in the distance and into the little boy’s ear as he sleeps in bed. The feeling I had then replicated when I saw this book, so I picked it up. I read the back of it:

EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED
“’David Mitchell is, clearly, a genius…’ –The New York Times Book Review”
“ A postmodern visionary who is also a master of styles and genres, David Mitchell combines flat-out adventure, a Nabokovian love of puzzles, a keen eye for character, and a taste for mind-bending philosophical and scientific speculation in the tradition of Haruki Murakami, Umberto Eco, and Phillip K. Dick. The result is brilliantly original fiction that reveals how disparate people connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky.”
“’One of those how-the-holy-hell-did-he-do-it? Modern classics…’ – David Eggers

After reading this I checked Goodreads on my iPhone and saw a lineup of five and four stars from my friends. I took it with me and bought it. I couldn’t stop reading it. This is one of the best books I have ever read in my life. I absolutely adore it. Before I get into the basic story, let me describe the outline to you. I haven’t seen the movie, and I’ve heard it doesn’t hold up to the book well, but the movie is, I believe, structured chronologically. The book resembles a doll with many smaller dolls within. You open one and take out the next, open that and take out the smaller one. In other words, he lays it out like this: 1a, 2a, 3a, 4a, 5a, 6, 5b, 4b, 3b, 2b, 1b. His point in doing this ties in with themes interwoven throughout. He refers to time and events through one of his characters as “the ancient future.” Mitchell, in an interview I read, claimed to be a modern Buddhist, and reincarnation and enslavement to a meaningless cycle of births and deaths mingle with the connection of these stories.

He describes the story structure through one of his characters. I read it a few times and still only begin to grasp the depths:
“One model of time: an infinite matryoshka doll of painted moments, each ‘shell’ (the present) encased inside a nest of ‘shells’ (previous lives) I call the actual past but which we perceive as the virtual past. The doll of ‘now’ likewise encases a nest of presents yet to be, which I call the actual future but which we perceive as the virtual furture.”

With this in mind, I’ll outline a brief synopsis of each story. 1) THE PACIFIC JOURNAL OF ADAM EWING: A man rides across the ocean on a boat and becomes sick with a parasitic worm in his brain. A doctor works with him to ease and heal the pain. He meets a runaway slave, and spares his life and his secret. 2) LETTERS FROM ZEDELGHEM: A musician offers his supremely talented services to a famed and established musician stricken with syphilis. A love triangle emerge involving the man serving, the famed one’s wife, and eventually one unexpected other. 3) HALF-LIVES: THE FIRST LUISA REY MYSTERY: A woman reporter uncovers a big-name corporate secret and searches for the proof documents, at the threat of her life. She becomes involved in an action-packed adventure. 4) THE GHASTLY ORDEAL OF TIMOTHY CAVENDISH: A man with an acute and wonderful sense of humor strikes up some hot publishing deals, but when some people come to collect what they believe rightfully theirs, Timothy must pay or die. He flees, and is outwitted by his vengeful brother when he finds himself enslaved in a nursing home. 5) AN ORISON OF SONMI-451: A genetically engineered human being interviews with a documentarian in the future. She unfolds her story of escape from the slavery of corporate control, longing to escape her human-created destiny (slavery) and to expose what she has discovered of atrocious corporate crimes. This disturbing story echoes from Huxley and reveals a fresh perspective of the horrifying future of humanity. 6) SLOOSHA’S CROSSIN’ AN’ EV’RYTHIN’ AFTER: This challenging story comes from a leader of a future tribe set in Hawaii, and the challenge comes in understanding the accent of his English. A tribe wars another murderous tribe to keep peace, and worships a god named Sonmi. A Prescient comes to study, observe and build relationships with the tribe.

Every story ends with an exciting and unexpected climax. The stories form a novel because of the interconnected themes. Each main character struggles to overcome humanity’s tendency to enslave other humans. Technology and knowledge increase. Humanity’s taking more than “giant leaps” these days. However, something underlying in our natures never improves. We are selfish beings to the core, and only love and truth, not knowledge and technological advancement can cure our marred existence. The deep and beautiful philosophy connects like a thread of arguments, a simulacra of philosophical pleadings to the reader, bound by the chain of lives revealed with a sign – a birthmark on the shoulder, a comet, which, in the end, becomes a sun with six rays on the final main character.

Again, Cloud Atlas moved me, shook me, challenged me even in my own paradigm of religious beliefs. I loved this book, and plan to read it many times again. David Mitchell has earned the fourth spot on my favorite authors list, between C.S. Lewis and Ray Bradbury. I’ve already spent fourteen dollars on his latest release (The Bone Clocks). I plan on reading that soon, and may end up reading all his works within a short period.

I enjoyed the film that was spawned by this book. I haven't had time to read the book, partly due to time constraints, and partly because I disliked the style in the first chapter.

Something worries me more than the divisiveness of this particular book, though. It is the idea that some people seem to have here on Goodreads, that they have the last say on what is "allowed" to be said about a book, and that, if we are Goodreads friends, we have to all agree about how we feel about a particular book.

That, people, is BS plain and simple.

I reserve the right to say exactly what I want to about a book, and if Amazon won't allow me, I will post that opinion elsewhere.

But NObody tells me what to do anymore. Not anymore. My parents had that prerogaritive for a long time, but I'm all grown up now, and I will say EXACTLY WHAT I WANT to, about which book I want to.

Sue me.

“I never said it would be easy. I only said it would be worth it.”
– Mae West

That is one of my favorite quotes, and it accurately describes David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas.

Utilizing a unique format, Cloud Atlas reads like a collection of short stories – the narrative thread is almost imperceptible, how these stories are connected.

The brilliance of this novel didn’t reveal itself until the last half of the book, and the beginning has more vocab words than the SAT test.

As a result of the structure, the characters were unevenly spaced, and when they reappeared, we should have been given a little tickler to get us to remember where we left off.

My battered copy of Atlas Shrugged had some v. interesting censorship. “Drink your own p--- if you get a thirst.” What utter nonsense! In the audiobook, this censorship was unceremoniously dropped. Thank G--!

Cloud Atlas is a sophisticated, ambitious novel with sublime characters, nailing the three elements of a perfect morally grey character: intelligence, great quotes, and humor. Allow me to leave you with a few of these quotes.

“Tapped on the pane and asked in French if she’d save my life by falling in love with me. Shook her head but got an amused smile.”

“Asked if I could borrow a policeman’s bicycle for an indefinite period. Told me that was most irregular. Assured him that I was most irregular.”

2025 Reading Schedule
JantA Town Like Alice
FebtBirdsong
MartCaptain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Berniere
AprtWar and Peace
MaytThe Woman in White
JuntAtonement
JultThe Shadow of the Wind
AugtJude the Obscure
SeptUlysses
OcttVanity Fair
NovtA Fine Balance
DectGerminal

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